PEOPLE

When Hari and Amitava chat

Desai’s mighty penPARESH GANDHI

The last time Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar met they were both in trouble at the JaipurLiterary Festival for reading fromSalman Rushdie’s banned SatanicVerses, and were advised to leave India.The two authors caught up again, via e-mail, when Kumar interviewed Kunzrufor The Paris Review about hisnovel Gods Without Men, whichreleased this month. Explaining how hisfourth novel came about, Kunzru said, ‘Igot stuck in Los Angeles on 9/11. I’dbeen in California for a couple monthsand was supposed to fly home toEngland the next day, which was notgoing to happen. I had a weird experi-ence involving trying to give back a littlerented Japanese sports car with Arizonaplates, freeways being closed, gettingWhen Anita Desai writes, the world’s bound to take note. The novelist, who has been shortlistedfor the Booker Prize thrice and is a winnerof India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, hasnow been picked as a finalist for thePEN/Faulkner award for fiction — thecountry’s largest peer-juried prize — forher 2011 book The Artist ofDisappearance. She is up against RussellBanks (Lost Memory of Skin), StevenMillhauser ( We Others: New and SelectedStories, Don DeLillo ( The AngelEsmeralda: Nine Stories) and Julie Otsuka(The Buddha in the Attic).

Amitava KumarHari Kunzru

lost and driving round the perimeter of
ghostly, closed LAX on the tensest day
in modern American history. Then it
involved the LAPD and firearms. Only
my English accent stopped the f*****s
arresting me (the London born son of an
Indian father and an English mother, he
has been described as having ‘a nonspecifically exotic appearance’). It
wouldn’t work so well now with cops
and immigration people in the Western
US — they’ve got English-accented
Pakistanis on their radar. Anyhow, I got
away unshot and found West Hollywood
full of freaked out hipsters telling each
other someone was about to fly planes
into the Hollywood sign. People were
losing their minds. I decided to get out
of the city and drove to Death Valley,
which seemed quiet and appropriate. I
had a very intense few days. It stayed
with me, but I didn’t realize I had to
write about it until much more recently,
in 2008.’ Needless to say, the Jaipur
controversy came up. Kunzru said, ‘My
main reaction is that Indian public life
is weakened considerably by the presence of so many offense laws on the
books. Offense law is a weapon that can
be picked up by all sorts of people for all
sorts of reasons. It’s a dangerous thing
for a democracy to have lying around,
like a loaded gun.’

Salman Khan,
and Somy Ali below

The truth about Salman & SomySomy Ali caught the public eye in the 1990s as Bollywood star Salman Khan’s girlfriend and isappeared (after appearing in nine forget-table Hindi films) just as quickly from the mediaglare after the end of their eight-year relationship.Much has been written about them since then,but it is only recently that Ali, now a women’sright champion, has set the record straight. Alitells The New York Times that she moved fromMiami to Mumbai in 1992, when she was 15, withone agenda — marrying Salman. ‘Despite havingmoved to Florida from Pakistan at a young age,Ms Ali somehow persuaded her father to send herto India under the pretext of wanting to experi-ence the culture. She had celebrated photogra-pher Gautam Rajadhyaksha shoot her portfolio,’

COUR TES Y: JORDAN MICHAEL ZUNIGA/SOM YALI. COM

and offered her a role in his next film. Ali had‘zero interest in being an actress.’ Her focus wasSalman, who was then seeing actress SangeetaBijlani. He broke up with the actress to date Ali,and the two remained together until he fell forAishwarya Rai. ‘It was probably karma for me —I was so engrossed and selfish about my dreamthat I’d ignored the fact that he was with someoneelse. It was so wrong, ethically and morally, but Irealized this at 35, not at 16,’ Ali told the NYT.Depressed, she moved back to Florida in 2000.And has come a long way since then. She not onlycompleted her education, but also made docu-mentaries, launched a clothing line and foundedNo More Tears to helps victims of domesticabuse. But before you even think it, Ali is quick topoint out that there’s no personal history here(the rumor of Salman smashing a Coke bottle onher head is well known). ‘I was out with somefriends and had a rum and Coke; he felt I was inwrong company and didn’t want me drinking, sohe poured it on the table,’ she tells the newspaper.‘Now I think he did the right thing. But a mediaguy blew it out of proportion. It went from onething to another... He (Salman) has the most gen-erous heart I’ve ever seen. He will give the shirtoff his back to someone. In my teenage years if Ilearned a lot about being good and doing good, Ilearned it from him and his family. He wasbeyond wonderful to me… aside from the cheat-ing.’Though Ali and Salman are friends again, shehas not gone back to India since 2000 and saysshe has no reason to. Her focus, for now, is No

More Tears.

Deepa’s lifetimeachievement

Filmmaker Deepa Mehta added to her list of kudos this month when she was placed among Canada’s cultural
elite with a Governor General’s Performing
Arts Award. Chosen for the Lifetime
Artistic Achievement award along with